When most businesses develop SEO strategies, they focus on the website’s technical performance, content assets, and marketing campaigns. Many overlook the value of aligning your website performance tactics with seasonal trends.
A seasonal SEO strategy lets you create content and develop marketing activities centered around your clients’ seasonal needs to increase traffic and boost conversions throughout the year.
As an HVAC business owner, understanding how people may interact with your business in the upcoming seasons can feel challenging. At Relentless Digital, we provide comprehensive SEO services for HVAC companies. Below, our digital marketing experts discuss everything you need to know about creating and executing seasonal SEO campaigns for your HVAC business.
What Is Seasonal SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to adjusting your website to rank high in search results for desired keywords. Seasonal SEO refers to how different seasons or events affect your business or website performance. Annual events may include Black Friday, Christmas, the start of Summer, the first snowfall, Easter, etc.
Seasonal SEO analyzes how different products or services perform year-round. The primary types of seasonal SEO include time- and event-based. Time-based SEO covers wider seasons, like all of summer, while event-based SEO includes specific holiday triggers, like Valentine’s day.
How Do Seasonal Trends Affect Your Business?
Different seasonal trends affect your HVAC business as the weather changes. Your clients typically need your services most at the start of summer and winter as they gear up their ACs and heaters for the season. You may experience lulls during the holiday season as families hold off on upgrades or repairs unless it’s critical.
Learning how peak times and slow seasons affect your SEO strategy is important because:
- You can use season-related actionable insights to generate more traffic and conversions.
- You can schedule your SEO efforts for great success.
- You can increase brand awareness during the low season.
- You can better understand fluctuations across your data and analytics.
How Can I Determine My Peak Season and Slow Times?
Not all HVAC businesses have the same peak seasons and slow times. For example, a company in Florida will likely experience far more AC contacts during the summer with fewer furnace needs in the winter compared to a business in Alaska.
So, how can you determine your company’s seasonal marketing needs?
You can use Google Trends to view how your products and services perform over time. Google Trends shows you fluctuations in popularity and search trends. By analyzing this data over the last few years, you can determine when your traffic increases and decreases.
Navigating Seasonal SEO Trends
Now that you know why seasonal SEO is critical for your HVAC business, it’s time to implement it in your marketing strategy. We recommend the following steps to begin planning for the next season.
1. Plan Far in Advance
Seasonal marketing strategies require advanced forethought and planning. To land in search engine results for important keywords, you must create relevant content and website assets using the terms for at least a few months.
For example, let’s say you want to rank well for “How To Prepare Your AC for Summer” by June 1. You likely cannot achieve this by writing one article on May 15th. You must create a long-term execution plan centered around seasonal keywords, landing pages, and more.
We recommend planning seasonal content and strategies at least six months to one year in advance. You need ample time to execute your keyword research, update your existing seasonal content, and create product pages aligned with the time of year.
2. Analyze Google Trends
Use Google Trends to shape your seasonal SEO strategies. On Google Search Console and Google Analytics, you can view how your products or services perform over yearly and monthly periods, allowing you to locate recurring highs and lows.
We recommend analyzing how your brand performs individually as well as against similar companies in your industry. For example, you may discover that many other local HVAC businesses struggle during the holiday season but use seasonal content to maintain consumer interest. Competitive research can help you generate keyword and content ideas.
You should also analyze how your paid advertisements perform during different seasons. If you notice that certain campaigns provide low ROIs during your off-season, you may want to select a new marketing strategy for those months. For example, you could focus on republishing outdated content during the Christmas period.
3. Prepare Business Stakeholders
Anyone invested in your business will likely feel concerned when they see unexplained or sudden performance drops. Seasonal business changes affect all industries and should not concern your stakeholders. To prevent any apprehension, inform your investors of performance fluctuations and predicted changes so they will know what to expect.
For example, if your search traffic and sales always drop during December but increase in May and October, you should show them the exact data proving this information yearly. We recommend including footnotes with your data, explaining the reasoning behind such fluctuations.
4. Execute Your Seasonal SEO Campaign
After completing your research and planning, it’s time to execute your seasonal SEO campaign. Your campaign should cover the following items:
- Seasonal pages: Your seasonal pages advertise specific products or services and sales that you offer during peak and lull seasons. For example, in the Fall, you may need a seasonal page advertising your furnace inspection and repair services. For Black Friday, you could create a discount page advertising your sales.
- Seasonal content: Seasonal content refers to how you will attract organic traffic based on your keyword research. You can publish blogs relating to the time of year, update website page content to align with the current season, create collaborative content with industry experts or influencers, and more.
- Site construction: Your website should easily guide new customers toward the seasonal content they need. For example, during the Spring, you may add internal links to your header and footer for AC installation services. Consider user intent and only make adjustments that will be easy to reverse and replicate once the season ends.
- Paid campaigns: You don’t need paid campaigns in your seasonal strategy, but if you already pay for different ads, you should consider adjusting them. Use your search volume and keyword research to determine the most effective way to spend your advertising budget. You can implement many organic strategies to reduce off-season spending, like developing natural backlinks through social media posts.
Seasonal SEO Tips for Contractors
Crafting the perfect website for search engines and leads each season is challenging. If you need help generating your seasonal strategy, try our tips below.
1. Perfect Your Site’s Technical SEO
You will not see results from seasonal SEO work without a website built for success. Technical SEO refers to your website’s construction and how it impacts your site’s rankings. Everything from broken links to a long title tag can reduce your website’s performance.
Technical SEO can feel overwhelming, especially for HVAC experts that don’t know much about development. Use our checklist below to ensure that your website is in tip-top shape:
- Check your site’s loading speed: You can check page and site loading speed using various tools. Slow loading speeds dampen the user experience and reduce your rankings. You can improve your loading speed by optimizing image sizes, reducing on-page elements, and perfecting any custom coding.
- Locate and remove errors: Website errors may include duplicates, error pages, broken links, and more. You can use a site crawler to locate all errors and resolve them.
- Optimize pages for mobile: If you don’t optimize your pages for mobile screens, you will not rank as high. We recommend using responsive web designs that automatically adjust to every screen size.
- Perfect your heading tags: When you build website pages and content, you create heading structures using tags for H1, H2, H3, etc. The structures tell search engines how to crawl and analyze your site. Always follow all best practices when using heading tags, like never skipping from an H1 to an H3 without an H2 in-between.
- Customize your meta information: Your title tag and meta description includes the short blurb that appears in search results describing your page’s content. Your title and description must meet certain character- and word-length requirements while including target keywords.
2. Research Relevant Holiday Shopping Season Keywords
You may not think the holiday shopping season applies to your HVAC business, but you can use certain keywords to your advantage.
For example, if “Black Friday deals” yields high search volumes around Thanksgiving, you may want to incorporate it into your content. You could create service pages advertising your Black Friday discounts or write blogs like “Black Friday Deals for Reducing Energy Costs” with lists of related products, like modern ceiling fans or window replacements, with a call-to-action advertising your HVAC services. You may also discover opportunities for phrases like “Staying Warm During the Holidays.”
You can locate hot holiday terms by researching Google trends from resources like the Search Engine Journal.
3. Create Seasonal Content for Holiday Improvement Projects
People often prefer to postpone their HVAC service needs until after the holidays. During the holiday season, your potential clients want to focus on their families and save money for gifts and celebrations. You can use this lull to your advantage by generating brand awareness so that your readers know exactly who to call when Spring rolls around.
One of the top content opportunities during off-seasons is DIY (do-it-yourself) ideas. If your consumers aren’t ready to pay for your service, teach them how to fix problems themselves (for now) so they trust your brand in the future. Here are a few HVAC DIY improvement article ideas:
- “Tips on Staying Warm This Winter”
- “How To Keep Energy Bills Low During the Holidays”
- “How To Replace Your Furnace Filter”
- “Troubleshooting Furnace Issues”
- “Preparing Your Home for Winter Storms”
4. Build Landing Pages for the Specific Season
Landing pages include conversion-focused content crafted for a specific target audience. Season-specific pages allow you to increase conversion likelihood by adjusting your keywords and content tactics based on the time of year.
We recommend generating a set of seasonal pages that you can rotate through each year so you don’t have to construct new ones every few months. Avoid mentioning the exact year or other time-specific details so you can re-use your content in the future. Your landing page should include the following:
- Engaging information about your service
- Language that evokes urgency
- Striking visuals
- Social proofs from past clients
- Target keywords
- Distraction-free designs
- A clear call to action
5. Keep Local Listings Up-to-Date
As a service-oriented business, your local listings play a large role in your sale and conversion numbers. People can’t simply add your items to their cart and purchase online; instead, they search for things like “furnace repair near me” to find the best-fit service with a phone number to call. Updating your local listings across all platforms, like Yelp and Google My Business, helps provide searchers with the relevant information they need.
We recommend updating the following details:
- Your holiday hours and schedule
- Any new reviews from recent clients
- Best-fit contact details
- Your accurate company location
- Seasonal images for your services
The more frequently you update your listings, the higher they may rank in search results. Try urging your clients to leave reviews for improved rankability as well.
6. Use Evergreen URLs
When you create any seasonal promotions, we recommend using evergreen URLs. Adjusting page content with season changes is easy, though editing your URLs every few months causes a domino effect of redirects. To avoid the future headache of broken links and complications, use vague URLs that can work across all seasons.
Perfect Your Seasonal SEO Strategies With Relentless Digital
It’s not easy to create a seasonal SEO strategy that boosts your website’s performance during the off-season while accelerating your traffic and contacts during peak times. If you need support generating and executing seasonal marketing plans, our SEO experts can help.
Schedule a strategy call with our team at Relentless Digital today at (262) 720-5739 to learn how we can help your HVAC business increase your SEO ROI.
